The present invention relates generally to cooking apparatus and, in a preferred embodiment thereof, more particularly provides a commercial hot air impingement cooking oven which may be utilized to very rapidly and evenly cook pizzas and provides a variety of advantages over conventional commercial pizza cooking devices such as the familiar "stone hearth" oven.
Conventional commercial cooking devices, such as stone hearth ovens, used to cook pizzas, bread, pastries and the like are subject to a variety of well known disadvantages and limitations including relatively high fabrication and operating costs, lengthy pre-cooking warmup time, undesirable variation in batch-to-batch cooking times, and/or uneven heat transfer to the food items being cooked.
The stone hearth used in these conventional pizza ovens to support and cook the pizzas is typically approximately 11/2" thick and takes approximately two hours to be preheated from room temperature to its approximately 500.degree. F. operating temperature. Because of this elongated warmup time, it is conventional practice, while the pizza establishment is closed during the night, to very uneconomically maintain the oven at a holding temperature of approximately 300.degree. F. so that the warmup time at the beginning of the next business day is reduced to an acceptably short time.
Because of the very substantial thermal lag unavoidably associated with these thick stone hearths, there is a substantial variation in batch cooking times. For example, the first batch of pizzas cooked in a given business day, after the stone hearth has been preheated to its 500.degree. F. operating temperature, takes approximately 10 minutes. However, the next batch typically takes approximately 12 minutes, and the succeeding batches take approximately 15 minutes each.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide improved commercial cooking apparatus for pizzas, bread, pastries and the like which eliminates or minimizes abovementioned and other disadvantages and limitations typically associated with commercial cooking devices such as stone hearth pizza ovens.